Fief giveaways should be 100% random (to hopefully piss off people, fuck with claims, and break blocs and such trends). Free gear should stay as it is. Your troop cap idea is retarded and fucks over every faction that doesn't have 100+ members. And you're forgetting the two most important changes to make strat less shitty; keeping gear low end by making trading less insanely profitable, and adding a food system to give villages value, and force you to attack something if you already got as many troops as your current land can hold, along with this troop recruitment should imo be speeded up to two troops per hour. Should ensure for more battles, with lower quality gear (plate is fucking boring besides the insane xp), real starvation based sieging, villages not being abandoned when invaded, and slower expansion yet no cold wars.
Think of the troop cap as an automated food system. Every active player (those with ticks) generates enough food to support X troops. This way just takes the tedious man management out of it. making villages important is nice but that also means we reduce the number of easier targets for newer/smaller clans. I want villages to be attacked regularly and not defended to the hilt, but to make these attacks more worthwhile and fun I want to increase free gear so that it is always worth putting out a roster and fighting. Adding free gear to attackers also means people can start attacking as soon as they have troops without having to trade as well
A proper besieging system would be nice to go with it however I believe it would take too much time to code/balance and therefore instead I opted for a hard troop cap instead. If done right the score board will drive clans to make attacks along with the fact that they will be wasting ticks if they are at the troop cap and don't attack anybody.
As for Plate - the idea is that by adding a scoreboard you can reset strat every X months with a declared winner meaning it can be timed to end before we get to full plate armies.
Not sure on Fief giveaways being 100% random as there are something like 4000-5000 players spawned on Strat but only 500 of them would ever want a fief. Possibly it should be random to those who have more than the average renown this strat, but there was a renown bug a while back that means that won't work.