Strategus Suggestions

[Tristan]

I like the idea. Add to that cooties idea of taxation of regions and my idea of titles for larger kingdoms + duchies and we're going somewhere.

The idea:

I really like your suggestion Cooties.

Something along the lines of Crusader Kings (Paradox game). If you have x% of fiefs under your control or your vassals you could claim a title.
A title gave you the right to tax people.

In strat it could work something along these lines:

If the map is to be four times larger than now, then lets have 4 kingdoms.
Each Kingdom contains 5 duchies. You can claim a Duchy title when you have 66% of the fiefs in a duchy. HAving the duchy title gives you the right to tax every fief owner in the duchy.
When you control 3 of the 5 duchy titles or your vassals (Must be official vassals through an ingame system), you can claim the king title.
When you have the king title you can set a tax for the kingdom and what not.

Add to that:
- Attrition
- Vassal diplomatic system

It requires a larger map.

And we have something going.

Edit: Oh and if you gain 3 kingdoms you gain the title emperor and win the game!

[rubicon_crossed]

I think that xp should carry over from cRPG to strategus much like gold already does.

You should be able to level up and choose attributes for your retinue. The troops you initially recruit would start at some arbitrarily low level such as 10. A percentage of the xp you earn in cRPG would transfer to the strategus troops in your retinue, where the more troops you have, the slower they would level up do to xp splitting between multiple troops (There should in fact be a xp penalty the more troops you have). During a strategus battle, instead of initially choosing your weapons, you would choose the troop type you want to spawn as:
eg. In the two hander weapons section, you would see something to the effect as [RubiconCrossed_BRD's Troops, lv 21, 15/15, 100 troops], [RandomMerc's troops, lv31 24/15, 10 troops], etc.

This would make:
1.  Larger factions would still have 1000 troop armies (but would in general be not as high level) but individual/clanless players could easily level up a small "elite" number of troops that would be enticing to hire by larger factions.

2. Players would have a greater sense of ownership of their own troops.

3. Players would no longer be forced to create "strat friendly" main characters.

4. It could open up interesting dynamics where Mercs could retreat their portion of the troops on their side to not lose them. Some mercs could garner a reputation of fighting to the last man, while others would retreat at the first sign of a losing battle.

[Harafat]

 We should not get too carried away on this, devs are only devs, not a team of profesionnals paid a daily wage for coding this game.
So some of these changes can be implemented, but try to keep a tad simple, they cant go coding a totally different game by the time this strat will be wiped and the next one kicks in.

Viable options imo :

Random starting locations, as said this would greatly increase the fun and dynamics for every1 (in a clan or not)

Higher upkeep the further you move away from your own fiefs This would make mega alliances nearly impossible cuz u cant go attack some1 on the other side of the map, just cuz your friend asked for it. Hence dramaticly increasing local conflicts. Yes this could be abused by chain transfering, but if you are sharp enuff with "allow transfer" button, then rly, you deserve to win

Longer cooldown to get attacked after raiding/sieging The 24h lockdown compared to the 1h cooldown is retarded, i can travel half the map in 24 hrs, so raiders can actually raid, but get raped by the army thats standing next to them after the 24h lockdown.

[Xant]

Well it's up to them to implement what they want, if anything. All any one of us can do is brainstorm. Maybe they'll get another idea from something that was said, who knows.

[Vibe]

moded for stupid

[Elmokki]

One other option to more players recruiting = more troops thing would be harsh attrition / upkeep costs.

50ish troops is a small enough band to forage most of their food and have some supplies etc. There are probably no real diseases spreading in their fairly small camp etc. The number could be even less.

1000 troops is a huge army needing a huge supply train and knowing medieval military camps diseases would probably spread a lot. Also the more people there are the more chances there are for some getting fed up and deserting.

So basically:
1) Soldier upkeep models soldier salaries.
2) Add supplies as a resource to model necessary camp supplies / food / water needed to survive. Supplies should be a no-effort thing to buy from villages - or well, there could be some sort of limit to it but small armies should never have problems being fully supplied.

Salaries increase linearry. Meaning that 20 50 man armies cost the same as 1 1000 man army.
Supply consumption scales expotentially calculated from amount of units nearby on the field.
Generally more supply consumption causes more attrition. There's no real reason, but bigger army that eats more supplies is more prone to diseases etc. No modern toilets and lack of hygiene are the worse the more men are near each other. Also a shitton of attrition if supplies run out. Obviously if there's nothing to eat most men desert and the most loyal men starve to death.

So basically a band of 50 soldiers can fairly effortlessly run around without any problems. 200 soldiers would need only minor considerations. Moving armies of thousands of soldiers would require taking considerable amounts of supplies slowing you down slightly and it'd also cause some level of desertions making it a good idea to split armies while they are travelling as much as you dare and making it cost a lot to attack someone with a big army (your troops will be close to each other when regrouping to attack at latest anyway)

How big should the supply consumption increase or attrition be? I have no clue. If it is implemented it should be fairly light at start so that it won't make big armies too much of a pain.

[Kophka]

I LOVE (love) the idea of "each faction starts with a fief". It'd take some doing to keep factions from making "joke factions" and, but we can side step that by making Strategus application-only once again.

Here's how I see it working. You apply to the devs to join X-faction on Strategus. When it's time to go live, the faction leader submits the name of the fief (quality control here), and the devs put the fief on the new, larger, custom map. All starting fiefs are villages. There can be preset conditions for growing the fief into a castle, or even a town.

Troops come from fief ownership, and are put into a pool that ranking members of the faction can draw from. Factions can get a "bonus troop" for every faction member once per *insert suitable time frame here* (this makes large factions attractive, but doesn't give them a game changing advantage). Troops can be bought and sold between factions. Trade works as it currently does, but with a more standardized bonus for distance traveled.

When a faction is wiped off the map, there is a PM sent to every faction leader stating "x faction has been wiped off the map!". Members from the dead faction (or people that were never in a faction) can trade normally, build up gold, and buy troops to try to become a landed faction again.

[Keshian]

(click to show/hide)

One other option to more players recruiting = more troops thing would be harsh attrition / upkeep costs.

50ish troops is a small enough band to forage most of their food and have some supplies etc. There are probably no real diseases spreading in their fairly small camp etc. The number could be even less.

1000 troops is a huge army needing a huge supply train and knowing medieval military camps diseases would probably spread a lot. Also the more people there are the more chances there are for some getting fed up and deserting.

So basically:
1) Soldier upkeep models soldier salaries.
2) Add supplies as a resource to model necessary camp supplies / food / water needed to survive. Supplies should be a no-effort thing to buy from villages - or well, there could be some sort of limit to it but small armies should never have problems being fully supplied.

Salaries increase linearry. Meaning that 20 50 man armies cost the same as 1 1000 man army.
Supply consumption scales expotentially calculated from amount of units nearby on the field.
Generally more supply consumption causes more attrition. There's no real reason, but bigger army that eats more supplies is more prone to diseases etc. No modern toilets and lack of hygiene are the worse the more men are near each other. Also a shitton of attrition if supplies run out. Obviously if there's nothing to eat most men desert and the most loyal men starve to death.

So basically a band of 50 soldiers can fairly effortlessly run around without any problems. 200 soldiers would need only minor considerations. Moving armies of thousands of soldiers would require taking considerable amounts of supplies slowing you down slightly and it'd also cause some level of desertions making it a good idea to split armies while they are travelling as much as you dare and making it cost a lot to attack someone with a big army (your troops will be close to each other when regrouping to attack at latest anyway)

How big should the supply consumption increase or attrition be? I have no clue. If it is implemented it should be fairly light at start so that it won't make big armies too much of a pain.

Really don't like that.  One of the ebst things about strategus was large epic battles, taking villages, fortified castle, cities.  Its already disappearing and that would remove it and juts make it like normal battle server, which is incredibly boring.  We still want large battles, just not across the entire map.  So scaled upkeep by distance is better.  if anything upkeep should be lower in localized areas, to allow more troops and larger armies to face off in local skirmishes.  How many PvP 1000+ ticket battles have there been in Strategus 3.0 which has been up for over 2 months??  Less than a dozen.  Its really sad and no one has even attacked a city or castle.

[rubicon_crossed]

What's to stop people from just swapping fiefs to be near their respective allies?

[Keshian]

Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but this is too funny.  DRZ_Nebun just went through all my posts and gave me -1 on all my suggestions because they support removing large carebear alliances and long distance aggression (either that or he is a petty little kid that didnt even read them and was acting petulant).  Either way its really funny and the suggestions are actually good ones and easily codable.

Back on topic, these are some great ideas, has anyone let any of the developers on IRC know to check out this thread?? because I ahven't seen any feedback from them yet, which would be appreciated for giving an idea of what is implementable at a practical level for them.

[Knute]

(click to show/hide)

Continuation thread/Needs its own thread by popular demand from: http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,21727.0.html

I've been reading threads this weekend+yesterday and today. Clearly, FotM is raging at Strategus. Justified rage, I must add.

The problems are as following.

- Nothing to do for your standard faction grunt.

- Small clans and individuals have nothing to do.

- Massive alliances.

One solution would be to make Strategus more Total War-like.

For this we need a few things.

- Sign up system for factions at start of every Strategus round. This would require rules and admin supervising.

- Random faction spawning. Once you've signed up and Strategus begins, you and all your faction members will spawn at a random location and each faction is given a starting village.

- Settlement regions. Every village has a region with clear borders, owner of the village owns the surrounding lands. The land would need clear borders + more obstructive/impassible terrain which in turn would make it slightly more linear, throw in a choke point here and there too(Don't over-do it!) I believe this would encourage factions to deal with their closest neighbours first, making the start of Strategus a lot more small-scale, more local wars instead of block 1 vs block 2.

- Settlement recruitment. Instead of having one hundred players camp-recruting in one village you'd have the village owner recruiting troops. The number of troops who are recruitable are set to a specific number each day.

This would perhaps not fix all issues but help it greatly.

Let's keep this thread rage-free.

Interesting ideas.  I've had similar thoughts about preexisting factions.  Maybe it could go something like this:

Just like when you create a new character for the native SP game, you're given the option to start in a faction or as a neutral.  Each of the 6 starting factions (Swadian, Nord, Sarranid, etc) would start with one town and the villages connected to them in native singleplayer plus maybe a castle or two.  People that choose to start as a neutral would still be able to make their own clans, so same system as now but anyone choosing to join a preset faction would get an immediate advantage over them.  In each region, towns would only sell equipment that reflected the local culture.  Unless there's two maps, the same EU/NA split as now with maybe 2 NA zone kingdoms and 4 EU kingdoms.

People could quit factions at any time but there would be some cooldown time before they could join another.

Something like this would stir things up a bit and allow people who don't have a faction in cRPG to join one right away just for the Strategus style campaign.  Maybe they should forget about trying to make accommodate small clans in Strategus and have the game start with 6 big clans with a little neutral space around them, leading to more big wars right away.  If your kingdom gets taken out, you could join your enemies enemy.  Eventually leading to one big civil war. 

[SoA_Sir_ODHarry]

1 ability could be Pickocking or criminal actions which can be choosed as action in fiefsa so this although would be an option for clanless peeps to be active and influence clan powers.
Maybe they could prevent that by station more soldiers build any building or get something like magiststrats for fiefs which decrease criminal actions output

[Overdriven]

Some great ideas in this thread. Devs please read! Keep it up guys, this has my support 

[Tomas]

We should not get too carried away on this, devs are only devs, not a team of profesionnals paid a daily wage for coding this game.
So some of these changes can be implemented, but try to keep a tad simple, they cant go coding a totally different game by the time this strat will be wiped and the next one kicks in.

Viable options imo :

Random starting locations, as said this would greatly increase the fun and dynamics for every1 (in a clan or not)

Higher upkeep the further you move away from your own fiefs This would make mega alliances nearly impossible cuz u cant go attack some1 on the other side of the map, just cuz your friend asked for it. Hence dramaticly increasing local conflicts. Yes this could be abused by chain transfering, but if you are sharp enuff with "allow transfer" button, then rly, you deserve to win

Longer cooldown to get attacked after raiding/sieging The 24h lockdown compared to the 1h cooldown is retarded, i can travel half the map in 24 hrs, so raiders can actually raid, but get raped by the army thats standing next to them after the 24h lockdown.

+1

[Visconti]

This is a great idea.. +1