Strat is simulated warfare/politics and it in my opinion it isn't ment to be fair. Either the smaller clans have to ally to a larger force or be crushed if any larger force wills it. Splitting the servers wont change that much, the largest and most productive army is STILL going to dominate most of the land. Sure its going to reduce the player pool and some smaller clans can possibly get a fief. You are still going to get crushed when the bigger army looks your way. NA clans need to drop the petty individualistic attitude if they wish to gain a foothold. Anyways just my opinion.
If cheating is involved the banhammer needs to be dropped, period.
You might have missed the point about the economics tied to organization size, because this argument only makes sense by disregarding those facts.
Simply put, a group of 10 players can produce 10 resources. A group of 20 can produce 25 resources. A group of 40 can produce 40 resources.
Why?
Trade distance, territory control
as the most basic reason.
These numbers are just random examples to show a simple model for current Strategus mechanics, obviously not real Strategus figures.
Throw in the ability of larger factions to reduce economic disruption because of immediately superior power, relatively speaking (and taking territory faster, too) and smaller groups' cost challenge of maintaining their already limited production space in fiefs.
Yea... the only mechanic in Strategus that I can think of that doesn't favor large organizations is the 49-troop rule giving small players a baseline of troops to start with without cost penalty. Of course, anyone who plays Strategus seriously knows that 49 troops won't make a big difference until, you guessed it, you've got
a large organization with a lot of 49 troop pockets.
Here's an admittedly crappy example of what I mean. The ante for taking a village is 500 troops. If you have less, you're almost certain to fail at taking the village. So you need 10 players with 49 troops to gain the advantage of avoiding troop costs. A faction of 100 players, on the other hand, get 4900 "free" troops. Anteing up is super easy for this faction. So I'd make a totally arbitrary guess that you need at least 25 active players or so to gain any usable benefit from the 49 troop rule in regards to taking fiefs, which is the only way to make any serious, material benefit in Strategus.
This isn't nearly as important of a concern as the crazy broken economics and the positive feedback mechanism of unrestrained economic growth-by-size-times-distance overpowering smaller factions.
Lastly and most importantly, if we wanted a game that you win or lose based upon how many people you got to click a website every so often, for the LOVE OF GOD go play Kings of Chaos.
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