Simple solution

[Smiling Daemon]

I've always hoped that cRPG would evolve into the single player game except online. With non combat stats and skills so you can manage your army or battles better. With people in clans playing as the general and have more intelligence or charisma stats while being worse in battle then a dedicated soldier.

Maybe even a perk system that you spend your skill points on. Something that you can pick to be slightly better at something or unlock new abilities (shield bash, riding while hugging the horse on the side, sprinting, better zoom for archers, pulling rider off of a horse etc ...)

[Matey]

Its only more micro management for clans that are run as dictatorships with a couple of active Strat players doing all the work whilst everybody else just grinds goods/troops and then ocassionally does something more when specifically ordered to do so.

It is these very clans that the idea is trying to counter.  Having the most CD Keys at your disposal should not automatically make you the most powerful clan.

i dunno, people seem too bored to want to do more than just craft... so i guess if this actually motivated people to do more in strat then great... but i figure most people would will not want to dedicate much time to strat.

[Tomas]

i dunno, people seem too bored to want to do more than just craft... so i guess if this actually motivated people to do more in strat then great... but i figure most people would will not want to dedicate much time to strat.

Personally, i'd like to see all the people that don't want to actually play Strat, removed from Strat.

Let them fight their clan battles and give them a way back into Strat if they ever get motivated again, but rewarding them in Strat for doing virtually nothing and then basing the entire economy on them is just silly imo.  It actually encourages people to become inactive in Strat as clans need a certain ratio of active people to semi-active crafters in order to support their armies.  As it stands a clan with 10 active people and 10 cafters is disadvantaged compared to a clan with 5 actives and 15 crafters!!

What Strat needs is a complete overhaul of its economy to either take it away from the semi-active clan players or to make the goods they craft universally accessible to anybody that wants to buy them. 

1 way to do it is as the OP suggests, but it would need to go further and disable all transfers between players as well.  Then clans would have to build up their individual players in order to build up the clan and the only way to do that is for the individuals to actually play strat.

The 2nd would be to make the goods and equipment that the semi-actives craft only saleable on a marketplace.  That way any active player will be able to buy them and meanwhile the semi-active player will be able to suppliment their cRPG char a bit.  This is what I aimed for with Houses

[Dan lol]

This sounds like a very interesting idea that would make strat much more interesting and add consequences to actions. Also, the fewer one player army blobs that can shitroll straight into enemy territory unabated the better imo


however, since the suggestion was made by loki I am contractually obligated to say that it is bad and that he is a homo




e: perhaps any non lord player can have a 100-150 man army, and having fiefs will increase their army cap, much like the ai lords in native, where castles and towns yield them more troops?

[kinngrimm]

one thing i enjoyed in the single player game and found fairly realistic is the possibility to join in an attack after the attack was declared.

With parties with maximum 100 tickets being able to join(not transfer) with their tickets and their equipment could lead to a nice strategic development in strategus. As already told not all of the active players then would be defending the homelands and only really active players would be able to do stuff.

That would lead to a 24 hour resupply phase where all parties and all factions could join in in that battle on either site.


Not sure ff the problem though would be solved the OP mentioned, still nice feature.

To scale down carebear alliances, you need carrots to get factions into a diplomatic system which themselve then by joining be defined as alliances, thereby you then have the exact numbers of factions in a alliance only then you can include %values which reduce the efficency on production/trade/recruiting/...

The trick is to find a tasty carrot which gives more tehn enough insetives to join the diplomatic system that the efficency losses still would be accepted.
carrot examples:
- Allaince partners may see on the map what the other alliance partners could see
- alliance partners wouldn't need to "activate incoming transfers"
...

stick examples for alliances who joined mechanicly into a diplomatic relation within strategus:
- depending on overall membercount reduction in production/trade/recruitment
- even higher losses if soemthing from outside teh alliance would be traded to the alliance
...

EDIT: a possible goal could be to scale an efficency peek of around 70 members. So that by these balancing approaches alliances up to 70 players would be efficent anything above gets efficency losses which scales the overall production of such an alliance down to the the peek for 70 players. Advantage of bigger alliances would only be that they are more flexible in movements if they have more active members but they wouldn't be able to just outproduce. If then


Factions who don't join that alliance but would attack the same enemies, could be identified (the all knowing database sees it all and saves it) and when identified get the major losses in effecencies for a defined period of time as it would be considered an unhorable action to mess arround in other wars.
Parties who are neutral to each other have non-changeable trading taxes so that there is no secret support possible, if wanted you can expand the diplomacy system to treaties like support treaties, then there again the efficency would be changed to these parties.

[Tomas]

Think your carrot needs to be tastier.

The only thing that would really force people to declare alliances is if it was the only way to be able to sign up to each other's rosters.

[Blondin]

Or you could force alliance with system that allow transfert fo gold/troops/gears only for allies.
Thus you can force ppl to ally, otherwise clans will make micro alliance to not suffer carebear's penalty.

[CrazyCracka420]

even more tedious micro isnt going to help when 99% of players dont care to do anything more involved in strat than craft/recruit and fight some battles.

That's the problem though.  People are able to go afk for a week in strategus and then login for 5 minutes to transfer their craft goods to someone who is active (or same for transferring troops). 

This allows massive clans who only have a few active people to dominate the game. 

I personally really like the original idea.  The dev's would probably need to adjust other areas of the game to accommodate for smaller armies.  Like castles and towns having less troops in them (or dropping the gold price of items like 25%, and make crafting items cheaper). 

Also Dan, in Native you can garrison an unlimited number of troops, but you still have an individual troop cap.  Being marshall or king allows you to lead more troops, maybe you could have fief ownership allow you to control more troops when moving around the map.

[Keshian]

cRPG has become a grind with upkeep, but now Strategus also has become a grind by making it such an insane amount of work just to get equipment for even 1 army.  Thats why it is boring.  The vast majority of the playerbase isn't interested ina ll the tedious micromanagement of running a caravan trip that takes over a week of readjusting your path back and forth around rivers,etc., or crafting without some kind of queue system allowing a set amount to be crafted instead of having to measure out gold piecemeal for every time you want to craft, or spend days moving even a medium-sized army that eats a week's worth of accumulated gold just to pay for upkeep. 

The new features' novelty has worn off and Strategus has lost its roots of being a WAR game not a TRADING game (poor implementation at that with only 1 good allowed at a time) and with it most of the fun.  Most players (at least in the clans I know) only want minimal involvement in the strategus map page,while participating actively in the actual battles.  Instead, the changes cut down on the number of real battles and increased the micromanagement on the map - so the active strategus map-players got overloaded and bored with insane amounts of tedious micromanagement and the strategus-battle oriented people got shafted with almost no real fights taking place because of how costly everything is and the amount of work needed to even have 1 battle.  So yes, both groups have been becoming inactive or quitting because of this (me included).

The fact that chadz kept the increased cost of items of 4x what it was in Strat 2.0, while the gold income was vastly decreased for the last 3 months, tells me he doesn't realize why people are getting bored with this mod.  Activity level on Strategus is the lowest I have ever seen it.

[CrazyCracka420]

I agree with your crafting issues and the time it takes to move across the map, there should be a queue where you decide how much of an item to craft, and you should be able to carry multiple goods at once (especially if you have troops to help carry them).  I still think the original idea doesn't affect this in any way.  If they bumped up movement speeds you'd be able to reasonably march a few people at the same time with 150 troops each to attack a village. 

I don't think the goal should be to make strategus more automated and let people be less interactive with it.  I think the goal should be to make your movements in strategus more "real time" and make people using strategus more often the goal.  Not just with the intention of needing to micromanage, but for all the same reasons you move around the map in single player.

If you just want to fight in battles, then strategus isn't for you (well signing up for battles might be).  I just don't get people's sentiment that they want you to be able to never sign into strategus and still be on equal footing as the clans who actually are active.

You can say it's "micromanagement" all you want, I don't think the goal of strategus should be to allow people to be less active on it with only 2 or 3 active members doing all the work (like trading and moving armies).   

If that means that the people who are playing strategus drops to 1/2 or a 1/4 of what we currently have, then so be it, at least the people playing would be active.  And I think Loki's idea would go a long way towards that goal.

[Keshian]

You can say it's "micromanagement" all you want, I don't think the goal of strategus should be to allow people to be less active on it with only 2 or 3 active members doing all the work (like trading and moving armies).

Not everyone has the time to dedicate to a web-browser game and similar to the sentiments of "changing cRPG so more casual players can be on equal footing with veterans" that was the idea of easy levelling to 30 but then a soft level cap of 31, Strategus has basically turned away most of the casual players I know because it really is too much work with almost no fun (battles) as a reward.  It feels even more of a grind to me now than cRPG.  I used to be incredibly active on Startegus, but with the amount of work I have to do just to equip a village is ridiculous and I would much rather spend those hours playing fun games.

Keep in mind this should be more casual for players - I would not consider myself a casual player but I find myself turned off by the tedious nature of this strategus and hearing the complaints of casual players - msot of them hate this version and dont want anything to do with it.

[CrazyCracka420]

Not everyone has the time to dedicate to a web-browser game and similar to the sentiments of "changing cRPG so more casual players can be on equal footing with veterans" that was the idea of easy levelling to 30 but then a soft level cap of 31, Strategus has basically turned away most of the casual players I know because it really is too much work with almost no fun (battles) as a reward.  It feels even more of a grind to me now than cRPG.  I used to be incredibly active on Startegus, but with the amount of work I have to do just to equip a village is ridiculous and I would much rather spend those hours playing fun games.

Keep in mind this should be more casual for players - I would not consider myself a casual player but I find myself turned off by the tedious nature of this strategus and hearing the complaints of casual players - msot of them hate this version and dont want anything to do with it.

So they should speed up the movement speeds, allow you to carry more than 1 good type, make items cheaper to make/purchase.  They shouldn't make it easier for very large clans to have 70 inactive players, and 3 active ones moving all of their goods and army around.  That's some bullshit.  The solution shouldn't be to make strategus more automated and less interactive, it should be to fix the problems that allow you to sit in a castle recruiting troops and once a week make the pilgrimage to your village and rinse/repeat.

I still think Loki's idea alone wouldn't fix anything, but it's a very good idea to me.  Would put smaller groups of active players into the same competitive level as huge clans that are inactive except for the one or two people moving their army and goods.

[Shadowren]

Loki's Suggestion doesn't fix anything, but i understand what he is trying to say.