I love the concept of Strategus, and have had a ton of fun spread out over the past year helping run a faction through many wars, conquests, and shameful defeats. This was the most ambitious version of strat yet, but some missteps in pacing and the big alliance building has crippled it a bit. What Strat could use is a wipe, and soon. However if you want to keep interest high from the start, there are some absolutely necessary fixes needed.
1. Greatly increased XP and actual payment for mercing, both NPC and faction villages and fights. This is the incentive to get pubbies playing in strat battles, which used to be cRPG centerpieces when they had huge payouts. Interest in those battles will drive interest in Strategus.
2. Greatly decreased crafting cost. I believe this is on its way, but it should probably just be implemented after a wipe instead. This will make crafting more rewarding, the gear level more reasonable, and hopefully cav won't be extinct.
3. Strat only balancing. I know you guys were working on it, but it was never implemented. The shield bonus is a great start, but in practice the quality of gear and archer spam kind of defeats it. The decreased accuracy for archers would do wonders for strategy in the battles, as mass ranged is a huge pain.
4. Deincentivize alliance building. We all know what this is about, UIF rears its head in every strat, and while they are all great clans who have been involved in some of the best battles in Strategus, the metagame swiftly becomes stale. I don't really have any good suggestions for this
but some sort of penalties would be nice.
5. More user choice in crafting skill. I don't like how random it is, being caught with random shit gear during a chadz text can fuck up your crafting tables, to be honest its a pretty shitty system. It'd be great if you can select specializations, such as armor, horses, or weapons, and get crafting bonuses for that. Some other ways to possibly lock items into your crafting loadout.
6. Get rid of the EU/NA split. I prefered the politics of the game when EU and NA were mixed together, things were more dynamic. I know NA fought hard for love and special treatment from the devs, but truth is we don't have the same level of playerbase as EU. There's a handful of clans only, our diplomacy is stale, the fiefs in our area are all shitty mountain camp maps, and I hate the snow.
7. That commander regenerating HP/respawn system sounded awesome. Add it!
If anyone has more suggestions we should keep the ideas flowing. I know a lot of people think Strat is stale, or even dead, but I've always been very fond of it. Strat battles are fun community events where clans all pile in a Teamspeak together and play their best while having fun. Strat 2.0 was really great for a while, before the bugs ruined it, and this Strat hasn't come close to the enthusiasm due to predictable diplomacy, poor balance and sluggish rate of increasing power.
