What is the aim of Strategus?

[Tomas]

I've been playing this game for a long time now and have made many suggestions that would make the game better in my eyes.  I have always based the ideas (rightly or wrongly) around the idea that Strategus is meant to be a persistent world that once finished and set going, will never need resetting and will dynamically shift with its population, always leaving room for new clans/people whilst naturally countering factions & Empires that over expand. 

At the moment though, Strategus gameplay seems to be more like a short term war game, where clans use diplomacy, backstabbing and anything else they can think of to knock all their rivals out of the game entirely.  Once they have suceeded in taking over the entire map with their Mega Alliance then Strat either dies, or restarts with a new map and therefore a new challenge.

Neither option is wrong but they are mutually exclusive in my eyes and right now I think that Strat is hovering between the 2 options.  It would be nice if chadz could confirm which way he actually wants Strat to go so that I (and others) can tailor our ideas to match.  Or maybe there is some other aim i'm missing?  Either way, it will save a lot of people a lot of time and typing if they new before hand whether or not their ideas take Strat in the right direction.

Failing that I've added a poll to see where the vocal minority of Strat want it to go ;)

[Sphinxer]

Big MMORPG will focus on Blue vs Red , or Blue vs Red vs Yellow , with clans within those alliances. So you always have Blue vs Red happening, making sure such thing of a carebear alliance is almost impossible, or if it's possible, at least the new clans will be pushed on the other side to balance.

Strategus has no such thing, so people ally themselves to as many people possible sometimes, and focus on making gold and getting good equip , get a big army well equiped and since there's no one to fight, backstabb someone or pick on the new small clans.

Lame ? I think so. If clans had Clan Level , where the more XP your members earn, the more XP your clan gets, and that level would decide how many fiefs you can have, then big alliances wouldn't bother picking on small clans if their limit is reached , giving a chance to newcomers to get a fief and start trading without having to pay ridiculous gold to another clan or being raped and becoming one big alliance's bitch and do their willing.

Strategus is now so based on trading to get gold that battles suck now. To win , you have to be 3:1 ratio , attack at night where only no-lives can play and have big alliances backing you up. There's no more 1 on 1 clan wars.

[Tomas]

Just removed the neither option as I've decided it is irrelevent.  You either want a game that gets reset as somebody wins (option 2) or you don't (option 1).

[Slamz]

It would be interesting to hear which way chadz is aiming.

Personally, I like both.

EVE is long term.  Massive map.  Alliances rise and fall but nobody has ever "won".  I think beyond a certain point you can just rely on people's natural tendency to upset each other to prevent super-huge alliances from forming.  Eventually some sub-leader gets pissed off and takes his 150 sub-members with him.

POTBS and Battleground Europe are short term.  If I recall correctly they both tend to take around 1-2 months for a map to end.

Planetside could be said to be super-short.  You could conquer a continent, break for dinner, come back and find its already been lost again.  This was one of Planetside's underlying flaws, incidentally.


But I hear chadz saying he wants a bigger map, which suggest he may be aiming more for EVE-style: a persistent world that doesn't have to ever end -- a world where if your clan gets routed, there's always some towns somewhere on the hinterlands that you can poke around in without anyone noticing and build your power back up.

There's certainly more work, beyond just a bigger map, to get us to that point, though.

[Torben]

adding this:  http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,21813.msg315676.html#msg315676 

this:  http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,11407.0.html


and maybe the red vs blue whatever thing,  like mentioned here: http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,21948.0.html

would help.

chack how many plus votes those posts have.

[Tomas_of_Miles]

I would assume since there are tonnes of different clans and non-clan players it would make more sense to have a long term persistent game with lots of neutral land as opposed to a only a couple of factions.

[Lepintoi]

 Also add the Anonymous sign up for village defends (I really have a problem with the fact no one defends a village against the big alliances...)
 and MOAR XP for strategus battles to get new and independant players to play strategus!

I like the short term idea, Strategus should be a 5-7 month board game that gets reset when there is a clear winner.

EDIT : add strategus info on load page of M&B, it took me half a year to find out and want to play strategus.

[FRANK_THE_TANK]

Strat is more like the bored/table top game Diplomacy.

The great thing about it is that its rules are simple and small and the game play is left up to us.

The funny thing is that it is both of the options you presented. If a clear winner came about it would only take a week or so before the clan started to fall apart and turn on its self for shitz and gigglz. And the whole damn thing would explode with a weeks of CIVIL WAR! Until all the armies had been wrecked and much loling was had by all.

[Tzar]

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[Tomas]

The funny thing is that it is both of the options you presented. If a clear winner came about it would only take a week or so before the clan started to fall apart and turn on its self for shitz and gigglz. And the whole damn thing would explode with a weeks of CIVIL WAR! Until all the armies had been wrecked and much loling was had by all.

This would be true if the definition of a "clear winner" was someone that has taken every fief (village, castle and town) on the map.  Unfortunately, Strat is currently won as soon as you control every village since this cripples your landless enemies gold production.  This still leaves months of taking Castles and Towns, fighting on each others rosters, and seeing off the occasional underfunded clan that turns up.  More than enough to keep the winning clans interested.  Meanwhile do you really think the losing clans will hang around long enough for the winning alliance to fall apart? 

[Keshian]

For me its about adding a whole new level of fun to cRPG where you apply your skills from the abttle server in unique tactical battles with clear objectives to further strategic goals.  Within that there needs to be sufficient number of battles to fulfill the enjoyment, while enough strategic (micromanagement) choices to make those battles feel more worthwhile.

The worst part of Strategus 3.0 for me is that the overall strategic choices have become overwhelmingly the whole game where its all about micromanagement and upkeep and everything else all to get a 5-10 battle that in the end you stop giving a shit about anymore as it only leads to 2-3 more weeks preparation fo a nother 5-10 minute battle.  The game, quite frankly, has become a tedious Civilization game and the abttles almost feel the same with autocalc.

You spend 30 minutes getting people on ts, talking tactics, waiting 5 minutes to sapwn - all for a 5 minutes peasant fight or a bunch of no shows!!!  You need both startegy and tactics, but with how slow troopsa nd gear are to produce and burdensome upkeep you end up just having strategy with little opportunity to experience tactics.  Go back to Strat 2.0 pleassssseee, keep trading if you must, but go back to having decent amount of gold so at least we can have cavalry and armor so the whole tactic in every fight isnt to just pew pew to victory against peasants.

[SquishMitten]

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For me its about adding a whole new level of fun to cRPG where you apply your skills from the abttle server in unique tactical battles with clear objectives to further strategic goals.  Within that there needs to be sufficient number of battles to fulfill the enjoyment, while enough strategic (micromanagement) choices to make those battles feel more worthwhile.

The worst part of Strategus 3.0 for me is that the overall strategic choices have become overwhelmingly the whole game where its all about micromanagement and upkeep and everything else all to get a 5-10 battle that in the end you stop giving a shit about anymore as it only leads to 2-3 more weeks preparation fo a nother 5-10 minute battle.  The game, quite frankly, has become a tedious Civilization game and the abttles almost feel the same with autocalc.

You spend 30 minutes getting people on ts, talking tactics, waiting 5 minutes to sapwn - all for a 5 minutes peasant fight or a bunch of no shows!!!  You need both startegy and tactics, but with how slow troopsa nd gear are to produce and burdensome upkeep you end up just having strategy with little opportunity to experience tactics.  Go back to Strat 2.0 pleassssseee, keep trading if you must, but go back to having decent amount of gold so at least we can have cavalry and armor so the whole tactic in every fight isnt to just pew pew to victory against peasants.

I agree with Kesh

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[CrazyCracka420]

Well I respect, but disagree with Kesh.  Didn't necessarily want to neg rep your comment, but I can't undo it without giving you a positive review :x

I think if you try and satisfy immediate "fun" it will really screw over the long term of strategus.  I actually like that it's taking months to capture castles and months longer to capture towns.  This sets the game up for a long term outlook.

[SquishMitten]

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Well I respect, but disagree with Kesh.  Didn't necessarily want to neg rep your comment, but I can't undo it without giving you a positive review :x

I think if you try and satisfy immediate "fun" it will really screw over the long term of strategus.  I actually like that it's taking months to capture castles and months longer to capture towns.  This sets the game up for a long term outlook.

It also means people get bored and stop playing

[Slamz]

I do like the "micromanagement" but I agree with Kesh that in general battles should be longer and better equipped.


I mean to do a battle you have to get people lined up to log in, arrange a Vent/TS server to meet at, set your alarm so you actually log in on time, get ready, etc, and if it's 49 vs 49, it's over in minutes.  Way too much prep for way too little action.

I think chadz may need to reconsider the formulas and aim for something more like 150 free troops before upkeep kicks in, as well as get a hustle on that 50% crafting cost reduction he mentioned a couple weeks back.  I don't particularly want to see massive plate armies but massive peasant armies isn't really an improvement (and has lead to archer problems both in Strat and cRPG).


Basically I think Strategus 3.0 has some really good concepts to it but has also had some crippling problems that devs have been slow to address.  We're like one or two good updates from having a really good thing here, I think.