There have been alot of ideas being thrown out there, but im going to touch on two ideas, one of which has not really been touched on and one that has but in a differnt way. These two ideas are Clan size (with my proposal there will be no more alliances), and driving compeition between clans to create lots of action and excietment (war).
Clan Size: This strat we have seen Chaos and Hosp engage in mass recruiting and in creating mega alliances in order to compete with one another. Having two massive factions fight each other isnt that fun and im sure it wasnt fun for all the smaller clans who had been subjugated into service for either of these two clans. I see no reason why next strat will not be an exact repeat of this strat unless something is changed, Chaos and Hosp will just fight the exact same war and it wasnt even that fun the first time around.
I propose a few things within this proposal. Strat faction size will be limited to 35-40 players or some appropriate number, ONLY faction members can fight in a factions battle, no mercs or allies. Making alliances will technically be illegal although you cant stop it (with this system in place allies will be much less effective anyways). I dont know alot about trading or giving money as financial support, but giving financial support should also be illegal or made impossible. This will have one or a few big impacts. These clans that have been engaging in mass recruiting will have to shed large numbers. These players will populate smaller clans like LL or KUTT and make them real contentdors, im sure many new clans will even start up and they too will be big enough to be contentdors.
Instead of having two massive factions, we will have many differnt medium sized factions that are independent. This will go a long way in making strat more fun and diverse. Instead of fighting the same war over and over again where everyone is on one side or there other there is a myriad of possibilities for different clans to fight one another. Not only that but strat will be more fun for these smaller clans as they arent being subjugated into one of the two mega alliances.
Not only that factions will actually have to take into account player skill instead of just recruiting whoever they can get. This will create a nice distribution of skill, players of one skill in one clan, players of another skill level in another clan kind of like in WoW. There are exceptions to this which is good too. I also think there would be a greater sense of commrodary in these smaller factions and more team work and tactics being utalized than in these massive faceless conglomerates we have now. There are other benefits too but they can go in the driving competition section which i will get to now.
Driving Compeition: We have to ask ourselves here what do we want out of strat? Well we want action and excitement, we want fun wars. So we need to alter the design of strat to strongly encourage wars. I already touched on having more clans, and this alone drives compeition. The more clans there are the more compeition there is to get fiefs and castles and cities. Driving competition can also prevent illegal alliances or make them highly undesirable. You can make alliances undesirable and drive competition by making fiefs very valuable.
I wont go in to that too much as others have done so, but having feifs actually generate large sums of money on their own (like in single player) to an extent instead of having your income determined to a large extent by how many players you have crafting stuff in one village. If it is made so that fiefs and what not generate large sums of money on thier own, then even a 35-40 man clan can get enough troops and gear to defend a large portion of land. Of course the more land you have the more money your going to make and the more armies you can afford and the better equipement you can afford.
Having better equipment in battle is always fun, and having more armies means you can have more fun strat battles, and when you can only fight in your factions strat battles its especially important that you work hard to get as much land and power as you can so that you and your members can have as much fun as possible fighting in as many strat battles as possible. For illegal alliances to exist in this system one clan leader would have to put the members of another clan above the members of his own clan, and i doubt many people would do that.
And i mean having fiefs generate the money is a good thing, does anyone actually enjoy sitting in a fief crafting bear meat. The players in your clan still matter, in fact with the clan size limits they are more important than ever as you dont have 200 players waiting in line to merc for you, you have to depend on the players in your faction to actually fight in your battles, that is their role.
