strat sucks

[a_bear_irl]

right now strat sucks ass, i think we can all agree that even if your clan is winning a war sitting in a fief crafting eels or sheep isn't fun unless you're so autistic that you get your kicks just from posting "heh we won" on the forums, here's a list of the major problems with strat right now

• minimal involvement as an average player

pretty self explanatory, 99% of players will never do anything other than sit in a fief crafting eels or an item they have good skill at and handing it off to someone else (who probably will do nothing other than collect goods, run them as far as possible and hand money to someone who *maybe* does something other than collect shit). CRPG is all about building your guy up, getting a reputation, etc, whereas in strat there's virtually no way to "make a difference" unless you're one of the few players leading a clan large enough to actually attack a fief or fight a war. shik and tydeus tried and got fucked by a giant alliance, twice (afaik). basically, someone should be able to come from CRPG and DO something in strat without being a clan leader. obviously at the same time a clan leader should be able to accomplish more than a random player, but that random player should be able to do more than craft and try to run goods without getting raided by a clan.

• massive alliances

more of an EU problem than an NA problem, but of course the big alliance in EU got so big that they had nobody to fight and had to come up here after months of peace and crafting. needs to be more incentive to fight, be it grouping clans into assigned factions, resources, continents, something

• economy

this ties into the first item, but the current trade system really sucks and money should be easier to get overall. the distance bonus encourages the huge dumb alliances too, compare EU running caravans across their entire zone to NA's limited "sphere of influence" trains. obviously the latter is what was supposed to happen, but the former is much more efficient so it's what ended up happening in carebear land down south. with money being so hard to come by it just makes sense to do whatever you can to increase your trade distance.

• mercing entirely political

also a product of the first item. obviously long-term players are mostly going to be in clans and guilds and they'll fight with their allies and clan most of the time, but when it comes to getting "unaffiliated" mercs for strat battles it's entirely down to who you know, i can't think of a single time i saw someone trying to attract mercs with actual payment, it was all who you know. additionally, the mercing system should be revamped along with the first item - players should be more powerful individually and they should also bring something to a "merc" contract besides skill. let me build up my own small army and merc that out for battles, this is somewhat possible currently but it's so insanely clunky the only guy to try it (tydeus, that i know of) GTX that iteration of strat after a single attempt at actually hiring himself out

basically these are the main things i think should be addressed in strat 4 because goddamn does strat 3 suck [/list]

[Tanken]

I agree with your whole list.

Thank you for stating it without holding back, though I wish there were a few more curse words in there to drive the point home (seriously).



It's really hard for smaller clans or groups of friends to get into Strategus and gain any sort of foothold. Alliances are a big problem with Strategus, and KUTT was only apart of the Greens since we were lumped into that war by forced hand of Hospitaller at Uslum. I agree that the individual players and smaller clans should have a chance at building themselves to be better--or more than what they are right now.

It's hard to say what could be done to fix that though.

I think you'd see two entirely different games of Strategus being played if NA and EU split into two different Maps, I honestly do. In NA, we enjoy raiding one another and letting smaller clans get large enough to be somewhat of heavy-hitters. However, every Strategus is wiped out by Humongous Alliances from EU and there's no stopping it, since they show no signs of stopping their alliances.

I honestly think it'd be way more fun for each clan to have no allies, or very few allies, and possibly have an ally system based on # of active people in your faction vs. the proposed faction's # of members. But this still doesn't really address your comment of individual players. Dunno.

[SeQuel]

STRATEGUS IS SO MUCH FUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

[FRANK_THE_TANK]

Ah come on Tanken. You guys where green, had you been bright pink and yelled "fuck chaos" Hospitaller would have walked straight by and left you alone.

I agree with the first part of your post. Trading and gaining money is too hard. Some people have posted some basic ideas, one of which I liked. You have a base crafting of 1 for the town/city goods, when you get an x4/5 multiplyer tick you gain a goods bonus crafting tick, with a maximum bonus of 10. It last 12 hours, so basically you play for a session and get rewarded with fast economic crafting. Meaning you can get a big old fat boost to your cash flow.

On the whole though I agree, I've been playing mostly on my own but also in a 2 man clan for all of strat 3 and its been both very fun, and very lame. The most important and fun aspect for me has been rallying mercs, which took a fucking LONG TIME!

I had to build up strat rep and run some fun battles before I knew that I could pull 20 good mercs (time dependent obviously) when I really need them. And until the big clans really strat laying into each other it was so hard.

Like my first battle against Chaos before the war really kicked off, it was back in december and I couldn't get NA players so I had, Muki, Arys and 20 Australian players and it was really fun, we got blown away.

But yeah, I have no idea about how to make it more fun for smaller groups other than to speed up the economy, sure it gives the big guys and advantage BUT it gets the small guys in the game. At the moment the turn around time for me to put an army together to attack a fief is about 2 weeks... which is fucking horrible lol, and that is only about 600 lightly armed troops.

[Materia]

Before I started playing, I thought its all "live" happening on a server, and its like native, just in multiplayer. Then I found out how it really looks like, and what does it have to offer.

Im playing, but its all happening very slow, already got attacked, made my one man faction. Well see.

[22nd_King_Plazek]

I am an Maerican, I am so cool. If I say enough shit it starts to be true.

Massive alliances are only on EU, red vs green did not count cause there was no blue.

[Cicero]

Massive alliances are only on EU, red vs green did not count cause there was no blue.

best insult on NA

[Turboflex]

Somebody posted this in another thread, but fiefs should rebel to neutral if you don't have enough garison in them. This would make it harder for large clans to expand since it would put a soft cap limit on their size as garisonning all kinds of empty fiefs will quickly add big expenses.

Add in a larger map also, and you should have more open fiefs on map, so room for smaller clans to either take their own or just chill out in a neutral place.

For mercing issues, I think people should have the option to sign up anonymously to a side. This way people wouldn't have to worry about political reprecussions if they wanted to fight (even against the interests of their clans and its allies). Definitely needed for NPC fiefs also, the EU carebear system let all kinds of clans capture fiefs and castles with minimal resistance because for political reasons nobody would sign up for defence.

[RandomDude]

The thing with anonymous sign ups is people will abuse it to help the other side sometimes.

A players rep (or bad rep) goes a long way towards whether or not they will be accepted into a player-run battle.

How anonymous are we talking about?

[roymorrison]

Uh why are you asking for any changes be made to the way strat battles are fought, the point of strat is to multi box as many accounts as humanly possible in order to move vast quantities of crafted bear asses to far away allied fiefs.

Actually, if strat 3 is any indication of how future strat restarts are going to play out, the best change that can be made is the removal of the "attack" option altogether since fighting only serves to weaken your faction.

Now go click a couple of buttons in your web browser and check back in a few days.

Thank you chadz for creating the pinnacle of the online gaming experience.

[Slamz]

Income sources need a hard looking at across the board.  Trade caravans and sacking AI castles shouldn't be the only serious money making methods.

Simply playing cRPG should at least be a competitive way to earn money.  Gold per tick should be vastly increased.  Playing 2 hours per night of cRPG should be enough money for the average solo player to at least run a decent raiding force, and would give fief-less clans an income source to fight back with.

Visibility should be based strongly on army size and composition -- poorly equipped and smaller groups should be far less visible.  Large armies with good equipment and anything with 100+ crates should be highly visible.  (1000 crates should be visible for the entire map.)  Basically I think "visibility" shouldn't be just your physical line of sight but should also include the NPC rumor mill.

[a_bear_irl]

in my opinion FIAT TRADE GOODS are a really bad idea for strat - what i mean is trade goods are only worth money because the devs have said they are (via the fiefs only buying them). on their own, in the glorious free market, trade goods are useless. they should be replaced by something that players would fight over for reasons other than "i can sell this at that village" - crafting resources or trade goods that also are used in a war or something other than "run this as far away as possible and sell it to a village".

plazek: red and green were big alliances to be sure, but the difference is that they were fighting each other as opposed to sitting in a fief watching allied caravans roll past, and the chances of them lasting once one had won that war was about 0%. the big EU alliance was so big and so strongly allied DRZ had to come up to NA and deal with 150-160 ping just to have a war to fight.

[22nd_King_Plazek]

Yea, I just think that if you want a serious discussion on the problems in strat you should avoid making dumb comments about EU vs NA.

You made some good points in your post but then you ruined it.

[a_bear_irl]

it's not "dumb comments", are you going to deny that EU is in an alliance so large you had to leave your "zone" to find an enemy? because that's what happened all last week. obviously that alliance is better for "winning" but it isn't very fun, and yeah i'm going to mention it in my post. deal with it

[Turboflex]

The thing with anonymous sign ups is people will abuse it to help the other side sometimes.

A players rep (or bad rep) goes a long way towards whether or not they will be accepted into a player-run battle.

How anonymous are we talking about?

That's agood point. Maybe anons could be given random aliases to anon under, and their battle histories (as anon) can be looked up.