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.
#1 is a must
#2 isn't the answer imo. Just knock 50 gold of all Strat prices and go from there. If this change drops an items cost to 0 or below then give it a price of 0.01 gold.
As it stands a initial army equipment list for 50 troops looks like:
50 Rawhide Coats
50 Felt Hats
50 Wrapping Boots
10 Hide Covered Shields
10 Light Spiked Clubs
15 Scythes
15 Axes
10 Short Bows
30 Arrows
Total Cost: 1666.8 gold
With this system the same equipment would only cost 2.4 gold
and for approx 1600 gold you would be able to buy the following
50 Padded Armour
50 Segmented Helmet
50 Mail Chausses
10 Plain Round Shields
10 One Handed Axes
15 Shortened Spear
15 Maul
10 Bows
30 Barbed Arrows
which is good basic gear. The expensive items meanwhile get less of a discount % and so remain rare.
#5 is good but not essential for a Strat wipe imo as it is merely annoying rather than game breaking when you get chadz text whilst using the wrong gear. In the future perhaps but not now.
#3 - The best thing they can do in Strat to nerf archers is change it so that 1 quiver = 1 weapon and therefore carrying 3 quivers per bow requires you to use crates and slows you down. Same with bolts. Ranged weapons are not overpowered themselves, it is the ammount of ammo they get that gives them the huge advantage. This also gives a nice defensive bonus for fiefs as they can store arrows without needing crates.
#4 is essential but the only good ideas i've seen for doing this are to have AI factions for people to join with permanent wars and alliances. Each faction is run by an AI king and members earn renown from fighting. The top X players based on renown get fief ownership. Renown will naturally decay if you don't do anything, and clans within the AI factions could help to give the clan leaders a % boost to all renown they earn to help keep them on top. Finally, each faction could have an overall troop limit that then limits all faction members according to their renown but with a min of 50 troops per member. E.g. A faction gets 20000 troops max and has 100 members with 50 renown each. Everybody therefore gets a max troop limit of 200. If 50 of those members do nothing and end up with 0 renown whilst the other 50 get to 200 renown then the first 50 will end up limited to 50 troops, whilst the 2nd 50 will be limited to 350 troops. Its a simple reward system that encourages activity and also encourages people to join smaller factions to gain power quicker.
#6 - 100% agree
#7 - would also like to see this, but not a priority for me
